Eleven minutes later I was pulling up to the bureau.
I returned the lockout kit to the body van.
I returned Rory Vandervelde’s house keys to the property room, sealing them in a new evidence bag that I filled out with Harkless’s name and the old time and date.
In Edmond’s office I put the locker keys in the master safe. I updated the tag on Fletcher Kohn’s locker keys to make it appear as though I had used them.
Down in the men’s room I replaced the purple carabiner in Edmond’s locker.
I kept Sean Vandervelde’s house key.
It was one thirty in the morning. My keycard had been active innumerable times. Cameras had caught me coming and going. But no one would review the log. No one would watch the tape. On the off chance that they did, I had a compelling excuse: I was going beyond the call of duty to help a grieving woman in need.
A few inconsistencies marred that story. It did not, for instance, account for why I’d left the bureau, only to return several hours later. I wasn’t worried. The people in this building were my colleagues and friends. We had a culture, a culture I had helped to foster, grounded in trust. Ten years is a long time.
I emerged into the hall.
“Clay?”
Kat Davenport was walking toward me. She smiled and drew me in for a shoulder bump. “What’s up, dude?”
Davenport was a relative newcomer. She’d never worked in the old building. I’d spent a year with her on night shift, our bond cemented by the trauma of digging up an infant buried in a public park. For months nobody came forward to claim the remains. The family turned out to be a bunch of homicidal neo-Nazis.
She said, “What brings you here at this godforsaken hour?”
I told Kat Davenport the Fabulous Tale of Fletcher Kohn’s Girlfriend.
She shook her head. “Get outta here, bro. You look like shit.”
The drive home was too short for the laptop to charge. I hung my uniform in the bathroom for reuse and went to the Great Wall of Cardboard.
Column three, second from the top: BREAD MACHINE.
I took down a different box, labeled BOOKS (CLAY).
Stack of noir, biography of Jerry West, nine-hundred-page history of Europe that I’d never read, and an equally weighty tome called A Practical Guide to Death Investigation that I had.
I pried out the history book and riffled its pages. Tucked into the chapter about the Ottoman wars was a personal check, made out to my daughter in the amount of a quarter of a million dollars and signed by a man whose missing sister I had found. The case was an outgrowth of the investigation into the dead infant in the park. I’d solved it off the clock. I’d never submitted the requisite paperwork for permission to moonlight and thus was not entitled to any compensation.
I rubbed the check between my fingers. It felt strangely insubstantial, as though the amount of money it represented ought to give it more weight. What I should have done was tear it up a long time ago. It was a temptation and a comfort; half insurance policy, half grenade. Cashing it would cause problems. Could, conceivably, kill my career.
If that wasn’t dead already.
Chapter 19
Thursday. Eighty-six hours in the dark.
On a bicycle I zigzagged the bombed-out avenues of a dreary industrial town, Rust Belt or Eastern Europe, miles of sterile apartment blocks and belching smokestacks. My legs jerked like ungreased pistons, the frame bucked wildly, an unbroken horse fighting to throw me; pedals scraped, metal shrieked, sparks flew, a shovel trenched the inside of my skull.
I swatted the phone chirping on the nightstand.
My pillow was soaked. The bedroom was icy and viscous, dark as the inside of a barrel.
Too dark for six thirty.
I lifted the phone. Six thirty.
Stumbling over to the window, I drew back the curtain on a world gone wrong.
The sky was molten orange. There was no horizon. No skyline. No clouds. No depth whatsoever: Haze grouted the empty space, flattening everything into a single, imminent sheet, the vaults of heaven pressing down on my rain gutters.
I touched the glass. It was freezing.
Every instinct screamed not to go outside. That to do so was to invite death.
I put on my unclean uniform.
Smoke and mist made a frigid slurry that stuck to my skin as I walked to my car. I knew it was there but I couldn’t smell anything at all.
Union City marked the southernmost limit of the shutoff zone. I lurched through traffic toward the Dumbarton Bridge, driving like an amateur. I wasn’t the only one. The sun had never risen. Nobody had woken up. Vehicles appeared from nowhere, surging up out of the murk and vanishing just as suddenly. In twelve miles I’d passed three accidents.
I told the phone to call Amy.
“Good morning,” she said. “How was your night?”
“I’ve had better.”
“I’m so sorry. Is it smoky in the house? It sounds like you’re in the car again.”
“Charging,” I said, which was true: I had Luke’s laptop on the passenger seat. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“I think we’re just going to hang out here and swim. I feel like we’ve filled our virtuous educational activity quota for the week. Should we talk about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“We were supposed to discuss coming home.”
“Have you seen what’s happening up here?”
“No.”
“Check the news.”
“Hang on.”
She was gone for a minute.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What is that?”
“I have no idea.”
I’d meant to coax her into staying put. But of course she reacted as I knew she would.
“Get out of there, Clay. Please.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“What do you mean? Go to the airport. Take the first flight.”
A FedEx truck stopped short. I stomped the brake.
“Can we see how the day goes?” I said. “I need to get a few things done around here.”
“Honey. Whatever it is, it can wait.”
“I’m concerned they might call me in.”
“To work? Did they say that?”
“They might.” I hated myself. “It’s not as bad as it looks. The air smells better, actually.”
“Clay. The actual sky is falling.”
“Please don’t get mad at me.”
“I’m not mad, I’m confused.”
“Believe me, I would like nothing more than to see you right now.”
“So?”
My body hurt, my soul hurt, lies piling up like bad debt. “I’m asking, please, if we can talk about it later.”
A beat.
“Whatever you want,” she said.
“Thank you. Is she around?”
“One sec... Say hi to Daddy.”
“Hi, Daddy,” Charlotte said.
The sound of her voice was unbearable. My voice broke in reply. “Hi, lovey. How are you?”
“Good.”
“Are you being a good girl for Mommy?”
No answer.
“She really is,” Amy said.
“That’s great. I’m so proud of you. I hope you both have a wonderful day.”
“Say thank you.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
A honk prodded at my back.
“You’re welcome. I love you, Charlotte.”
“I love you, too,” Charlotte said.
“Thank you for saying that, lovey.”
“You’re welcome, too.”
Past the toll plaza, the highway sank flush with the surrounding marshlands. The waters of the Bay were the same uniform, saturated orange as the sky and their surface oddly featureless and still, a lack of natural motion that was not tranquil but desolate. Commuters to either side of me jabbered in their steel cages. Overcome by claustrophobia, I cracked the window. Stiff brackish air flooded in. I quickly shut the window and told the phone to call Andrea.